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Friday, January 14, 2011

Breitbart is at it again! This time attacking a 78 year old woman

The target - Frances Fox Piven, a 78-year-old distinguished professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

The tool - people pretending to be students and working on a term paper.

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: I don’t actually listen to Glenn Beck. And I only became aware of it when I was interviewed by a couple of people pretending to be students and working on a term paper. I let them come to my home, and they interviewed me.

AMY GOODMAN: Who did they say they were?

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Students at Western State Michigan University. They said they had been assigned Challenging Authority, and that to do their term paper, they wanted to do a video, which, you know, I’m sort of used to. Students are always looking for ways to do a term paper without reading anything. So, I had been in an automobile accident, so I asked them to come to my home, if they wanted to. I said they could have an hour. And a couple of days later, the clips from the interview were up on the Andy Breitbart blog, a right-wing blog. So then a friend of mine googled this person, the lead person, and he was a right-wing operative in Michigan running a little organization devoted to attacking the teachers’ union in Michigan.

AMY GOODMAN: Who had been in your home.

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Pardon me?

AMY GOODMAN: Who had been in your home.

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Yes. And after that, I got maybe five or six requests by students for interviews, students I didn’t know. And then I googled each one, and they were none of them students. So it was just an idea that was going around in right-wing networks. And then, all of a sudden, I became aware of both the Glenn Beck shows and the other right-wing blogs and all the postings that were coming in from people who—you know, confused, angry, whatever, and thought that I was the source of all the problems that had overtaken the United States in the last 30 or 40 years.